I woke up one day last year and realized I was no longer listening to music. Instead, I just listened to sludge – a blur of indistinguishable songs that mimicked my taste in music. My sludge addiction stemmed from Spotify’s algorithmically curated playlists, which promised to help me focus or find music tailored to my tastes. The design of the app always pushed me in that direction, so I dutifully followed. It was so easy! Searching for good music takes time. But with one tap, these playlists trickled me into endless porridge that dissolved into the background. Often they were artists I had never heard of and – once the playlist was refreshed – I would never visit again.
At some point last year I decided: enough. I didn’t want sludge to rule my life. Instead, I launched a one-woman backlash that so far has consisted of resisting Spotify’s call to “discover” new music weekly, following artists I like on smaller platforms like SoundCloud, and taking of the drastic decision to spend $50 on a vinyl album I would like. already saved on my phone.
I felt pretty good about kicking my sludge habit. But last week I listened to a clip of Ariana Grande singing the Rihanna song “Diamonds.” Only Grande wasn’t Actually to sing. Her voice was generated by AI. This is the new iteration of sludge, I realized. And that got me thinking about the events of 20 years ago that brought us to this point where sludge threatens to take over music streaming.
Two decades ago, two music platforms launched into an anarchic and fast-growing internet. The first was The Pirate Bay, a torrent file-sharing site that allowed anyone to make music without spending a dime. The other was Apple’s iTunes Music Store – now just the iTunes Store – which is celebrating its 20th anniversary next week. Compared to The Pirate Bay, hoarding music on iTunes was expensive, with most songs costing around 99 cents.
The launch of these two platforms, less than a year apart, marked a crossroads for the way we consume music. The architects of each had a clear vision for the online future of music. When I spoke to Peter Sunde, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay, this week, he claimed that the site was intended to make music available to everyone, in the hope (perhaps idealistically) that doing so would help artists gain a wider audience. to buy concert tickets or merchandise. On the other hand, Apple’s project provided a way for the music industry to maintain its foothold in the scary new world created by the Internet, enriching Apple’s business while escaping the free download mania that is epitomized by sites like Napster.
iTunes survived the official Pirate Bay. The torrent site was taken down in 2014, and its Swedish founders, including Sunde, spent a brief stint in jail for copyright infringement. But the dominant model of music streaming turned out to be something in between the two: limitless music in exchange for a subscription (Spotify) or your time to watch ads (the free version of YouTube). But one thing about the iTunes Music Store was booming: Apple made songs as a standalone product. “No one had ever sold a song for 99 cents,” Steve Jobs told WIRED’s Steven Levy, your usual host, in 2003, adding that he needed to reassure record labels that this wouldn’t spell the death of the album.
Record labels were rightly concerned. Apple’s decision to release songs did contribute to the death of the album. That, in turn, opened the gates to sludge, where playlists were completely untethered songs from albums and even artists. My main problem with the algorithm-driven playlist culture is how the format — infinite streams of disparate songs designed for background noise — made me feel like the music was disposable and the artists interchangeable.
